681 
43 
py 1 



THE STATE OF THE NATION 



A SERMON. 



JOHN W. CHADWICK, 

MINISTER OF THE SECOND UNITARIAN CHURCH IN BROOKLYN. 



1878-79. 



DECEMBER. 



JAMES MILLER, PUBLISHER. 

779 Broadway, New York, 
Opposite A. T. Stewart & Co. 






S. W. GREEN'S 

Tvpe-Setting Machinery, 

i6 and i8 Jacob Street, 

New York. 



A FOURTH series of Mr. Chadwick's Sermons is publishing in 
this form for the season 1878-79. Copies can be had for six 
cents each (including postage of copies sent by mail) of James 
Miller, 779 Broadway, New York, opposite A. T. Stewart's, and 
at Tredwell's bookstore, 417 Fulton street, Brooklyn. Copies at 
the church in Brooklyn, corner of Clinton and Congress streets, 
2ixe free to all ; but voluntary subscriptions to the printing fund 
will be acceptable. 

I. THE FAITH OF THE DOUBTERS, 
n. RELIGION AND MORALITY. 
III. THE STATE OF THE NATION. 

The following Sermons, of the first and second and third 
series, can be supplied by Mr. Miller: 

THE HIGHER REVERENCE. 
THE BEST USE OF SUNDAY. 
ECONOMY AND WASTE. 
THE ANGEL SONG. 
THE MORALS OF BELIEF. 
, FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 
FATE AND FREEDOM. 
. THE RISING FAITH. 
THE CHILD JESUS. 

THE SIMPLICITY OF TRUE RELIGION. 
THE COMING MAN. 

Mr. Miller can also furnish "The Bible of To-Day, " by John 
W. Chadwick ; a rational account of the various books of the 
Bible ; the order of their appearance, authorship, object, etc. 
Sent by mail for $1.50. Also "A Book of Poems." Sent by 
mail for $1. 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



It was formerly the custom at least twice a 
year, on Fast-day and at Thankso-iyino--time, for 
teachers of religion to remind their hearers that 
they were not only individuals, not only mem- 
bers of a family circle, or of a church or town 
community, but also citizens of a great nation, 
and to inyite them to consider tJic state of the na- 
tion, if haply so C(^nsidering some path of public 
duty might be made more plain, some public 
sin be dragged to light, some public danger be 
proclaimed in time to be averted. This custom 
has never fallen into entire disuse, but since the 
war for liberty and honor, and the immediately 
succeeding agonies of reconstruction, the preacher 
has been more content than he was formerly 
upon these special occasions to dwell in a re- 
gion of sentiment, to be poetical about the gra})es 
and corn, and to leave questions of a more spe- 
cial nature for the newspapers and the politicians 
to debate and settle. The reason for this change 
is obvious to some extent. For many years be- 
fore the war the idea generally prevailed in min- 
isterial minds that there was really but one na- 
tional sin, and that the sin of slaver}'. And al- 
though it was sometimes a test of courage for 
the minister to say his plainest word about this 



220 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



sin, aware that A or B, perhaps his wealthiest 
parishioner, was inwardly making a running 
commentary on his performance which some- 
times became audibly profane, yet the courage 
demanded for such utterance was not so great as 
if the sinner had been there before him in the 
pews. Then, the long-smouldering volcano hav- 
ing broken out into the fierce wrath of civil 
war, the special occasions were improved by pul- 
pit orators to criticise the generalship of Burn- 
side or McClellan, or to insist that the govern- 
ment should use its war-power to make an end 
of slavery. Still further on, the preacher found 
his occupation in demanding that the reconstruc- 
tion of the S(nith should be upon the basis of 
equal rights for all. This also having been 
finally accomplished, it must be confessed that 
the preacher soon began to find it much more 
difificult than it had been to deal with public 
questions in his pulpit. The question of a 
proper currency became more and more the 
uppermost question in the political sphere, and 
this question is not one the right and wrong of 
which appear so plain to the average mind as of 
other questions which had preceded it. The 
preacher might well feel suspicious of his ability 
to adjudicate upon so critical a matter, when 
close at hand in the community were men of 
equal practical sagacity, equally able to succeed 
in practical affairs, who nevertheless differed as 
widely as possible concerning the engrossing 
question of the time. And so his function has 
been more and more confined to personal ethics, 
with an occasional raid upon the civil service or 



( 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



221 



a (generally) too indiscriminate attack upon the 
honesty of our public officers. 

All this has been very natural, and perhaps 
unavoidable, but in the mean time the nation has 
been " sounding on, a dim and perilous way, " now 
swerving this way and now that, and hnally, to 
all appearance, it has quite irrevocably declared 
itself for that financial policy which seems to me 
the policy of simple honesty. It is neither here 
nor there whether the national financiering was 
wisely managed amid the overwhelming excite- 
ment of the war, and under the enormous pres- 
sure of those immediate necessities which it im- 
posed upon us. There is the simple fact that 
under that pressure, amid that excitement, we 
made certain promises ; and having made them, 
and upon the strength of them • furnished our- 
selves with the sinews of war, there is nothing 
left for us to do but keep those promises, let 
come what will, and every man in the United 
States ought to prefer to live as simply as his 
father and grandfather did before him, and 
simpler, if need be, rather than that the prom- 
ises which the nation made should not be kept to 
the last syllable : and so they would, the poorest 
first of all, if the appeal had been made not to 
their selfishness and envy, but to their honor and 
their truth. 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When duty whispers low Thou must. 
The heart replies I can." 

But if the preachers have of late been more 
reluctant than formerly to enter on considera- 



222 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



tions of national duty and danger, the voice of 
criticism and of prophecy and warning has not 
failed us utterly. Rather has it made itself fre- 
quently and loudly heard, and it has been no 
" lovely song of one who has a pleasant voice 
and can play well on an instrument." Beyond 
the angry surge of war we thought we saw the 
smiling gleam of a millennial time ; but like the cru- 
sading children whose "Jerusalem the golden" 
turned out to be a squalid hamlet, swarming with 
thieves and harlots, so has what we took to be 
the goal of our desire proved to be but a single 
stage of an illimitable journey which still length- 
ens out before us, hundreds of weary miles. 
Never, it is safe to say, since we became a nation 
has there been so deep a tone of national distrust 
as there is now. Lying upon my desk as I wrote 
this sermon was a Thanksgiving sermon written 
more than a hundred years ago. It was preached 
December 15th, 1774, by Ezra wStiles, the great- 
o-randfather of my friend William Gannett, the 
President of Yale College, and the most distm- 
o-uished minister of his time. It is a manuscript 
sermon, but the writing is still legible enough, 
althouo-h the hand that wrote it has so long been 
dust. "It is the darkest da}^," he says, "that 
ever America saw." The first Continental Con- 
o-ress had met in Philadelphia only a few weeks 
before. And it was dark enough. But the dark- 
ness was from the overshadowing cloud of Brit- 
ish t3'ranny. The light within the people was 
not darkness yet, and now we know that dark- 
ness held within its bosom the promise of our 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



223 



national independence. Man}^ a time since then 
have men been ready to take up those words of 
the old revolutionary preacher and say, " It is the 
darkest day that ever America saw." And more 
than once, no doubt, it has been true. But every 
time the darkness has been a forerunner of the 
light. And every time, till now, the danger 
seemed to come either from some power outside 
the state or from some party in the state which 
threatened it with ruin. Never before has there 
been prevalent, as there is now, a very wide 
distrust not only of the fundamental character 
of our republican institutions, but, which is the 
saddest thing of all, of the moral fibre of the 
American people. Men are saying, The institu- 
tions are good enough, only they are too good for 
the people. They require virtue for their suc- 
cessful operation, and virtue is not to be had. The 
rich care only for their riches ; the poor care 
only to do as little work as possible for the most 
pay they can browbeat their employers into giv- 
ing them. This sort of talk and feeling is not so 
much here and there as it is everywhere. It is, 
you might say, in the' air. But now and then it 
is condensed into some newspaper or magazine 
article of unusual force, which attracts much at- 
tention and does much to increase the amount of 
pessimistic thought and feeling in the community. 
The extent to which this thought and feeling 
enter into individual minds is dependent very 
largely upon subjective conditions. " To him 
who wears a shoe," the saying is, " it is as if the 
earth were carpeted with leather." So long as a 



224 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



man's own business and dii^estion are first rate, 
the chances are that he will take a very cheerful 
view of the political and social situation. But 
let his business or digestion get into a bad way, 
and straightwav he is haunted by visions of gen- 
eral bankruptcy, and c(3mmunism, and so on. For 
the most part, too, theories of radical social re- 
form are generally the offspring of the involun- 
tarv idleness of cultured men whose self-esteem 
obliges them to suspect a fimdamental weakness 
in the structure of society in order to account for 
their individual misfortunes. The}- cannot con- 
ceive it possible that in a well-ordered society, 
even if in a well-ordered universe, persons of 
their ability should not have evervthing thev 
want. And as the involuntarv idleness of culti- 
vated men is the seed-garden of radical social 
ideas, so the wide field in which these ideas are 
broiidcast is the involuntary idleness of unculti- 
vated men, who if thev had ^vork enough to 
do, and consequently bread enough to eat and 
clothes enough to wear, would have neither the 
time nor disposition to inflame themselves with 
vague anticipations of a general breaking-up of 
the existing order. 

Nevertheless, we must beware lest our own 
well-fed optimism obscure for us the facts. 
Making all due allowance for subjective bias in 
men's estimate of the political and social situa- 
tion, the fact remains that in the state of the na- 
tion there are at present a good many things 
which are not as they should be, and which mav 
well excite the interest of the most thoughtful 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



225 



men. And by the state of the nation I do not mean 
the state of the government. One of the hopeful 
signs of the times is that so many are coming to 
see that the nation and the government of the 
nation are not equivalent terms. The nation is 
the total life of forty millions of people and more 
here in America. The government, or rather the 
administration of the government, does not in- 
clude, national and state together, the official life 
of more than half a million people, if so many. 
And this distinction between the government and 
the administration of the government is another 
distinction that we ought to learn to make. The 
best governments are capable of reckless admin- 
istration. The government of England now is 
the same that it was a dozen years ago. But the 
administration is very different ; in Gladstone's 
day it was ministerial and parliamentary, now it 
is almost wholly personal. Men talk about our 
government as if the system of official patronage 
were an essential part of it. But it is nothing of 
the sort. The election of John Quincy Adams 
in 1826 was to all intents and purposes a party 
change, and yet John Quincy Adams only re- 
moved two civil officers out of the thousands 
under his control, while Andrew Jackson, his im- 
mediate successor, removed hundreds and thou- 
sands. I do not mean that administration is 
everything, the form of government indifferent. 
Some forms of government are premiums upon 
official tyranny and corruption. But the best 
form of government that can be devised is capa- 
ble of maladministration, as the best locomotive 



226 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



that was ever built is capable of running- a whole 
train-load of passengers into perdition if a 
drunken engineer and fireman have it in charge. 
I do not doubt there are details of the American 
government which can be improved. But take 
it as it is, and let the administration of it be of 
corresponding wisdom and justice, and there 
shall not be a government on the face of the earth 
that shall insure so much security of life and 
property, and so much general happiness, as 
ours. Ay, even as it is, with all the maladminis- 
tration, it is the best government to live under 
that the sun shines upon. 

The administration of the government is one 
factor in the state of the nation, but it is not ex- 
haustive of the whole. As one factor, however, 
it is an important one. And I shall not deny that 
in the administration of our government there is 
abundant ground, not for despairing of the re- 
public, but for the deepest sorrow and huinilia- 
tion. There is, however, little need for me to 
say anything upon this head, the whole subject 
has so recently been canvassed here by one who 
is the most earnest and eloquent antagonist of our 
present system in the whole countr)-. And I need 
not remind you how conclusively Mr. Curtis 
proved that this svstem is neither essential to our 
republican form of government, seeing that until 
the time of Andrew Jackson, that incarnate mob, 
we never had any such system, nor to our method 
of party politics, seeing that England has this 
method just as much as we, without our mon- 
strous system of official patronage. But there are 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



227 



other evils in the administration of the govern- 
ment besides the maladministration of the civil 
service. Theoretically our government is a gov- 
ernment of the people, by the people, for the peo- 
ple. Practicallv it is not exactly this. It is a gov- 
ernment of the people, by the caucus, for — the 
Lord knows whom. We must vote for the candi- 
dates nominated bv the caucuses, or our vote is 
thrown awa}'. The moral is, that if a man would 
have political inlfuence, if he would have his unit 
count, he must attend the primaries. But here 
again the individual is a mere puppet. A set of 
candidates has been agreed upon beforehand. 
Everything has been cut and dried by a few igno- 
rant but ver}^ knowing persons in the back parlor 
of some retailer of wine and lager-bier. ' ' What are 
you going to do about it ?" The individual alone 
can do next to nothing. But honest men c^f force 
and pluck can so combine that they can counter- 
act to some extent the back-parlor oligarchies. If 
they do not, then we may well despair for the Re- 
public. The Natioi, which would be infallible if 
its conceit could make it so, says that men of force 
and pluck w^ill not combine to secure honest ad- 
ministration ; that they would rather be plundered 
by political rings than take the trouble to break 
them. If it is so, then the most pessimistic view 
of our political situation is likeliest to be true. 
That form of government cannot be devised which 
like a perfect crystal shall exclude from itself all 
impurity. " Eternal vigilance is the price of lib- 
erty." This ancient saying has not 3^et lost its 
point. But I have faith that there are men of 



228 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



force and pluck in all our cities, towns, and villages 
who, once they realize the situation, will go to 
work to mend it with a will. Here is a splendid 
opportunit}- for jou 3^oung men to break up the 
monotony of your too joyous lives or the dull 
apath}^ of your habitual amusements. You re- 
joice in athletic physical sports. Here is a chance 
for an athletic mind ; sometimes, perhaps, for an 
athletic body too. Here is occasion for you to 
brace and measure yourselves against the igno- 
rance and criminahty of the community. The 
future of America is in your hands if you are equal 
to the task imposed upon you by the present 
emergency, if you can rise to the high level of 
your glorious opportunity. 

One of the saddest things in our political situa- 
tion is the draining off of the best talent of the 
country from the sphere of politics into the sphere 
of mercantile activity. Time was when the best 
men in the community, the most able, the most cul- 
tured, looked to the political arena as the one place 
which they would choose wherein to exercise their 
gifts. For a long time this has not been the case. 
¥he acquisition of wealth has had superior attrac- 
tions to the acquisition of political power. But 
now that wealth has proved a dead-sea apple in so 
many hands, I can but hope that once again our 
best young men, upon the very threshold of their 
career, will set their hearts upon the acquisition 
of poHtical power, and, to the end that they may be 
worthy custodians of it, I would have them give 
the best part of their mental energy to studying 
the science and the art of government, and especi- 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



229 



ally to making- themselves acquainted with the or- 
igin and development of our own political system. 
One day, while I was at my bookseller's, a man 
came in and said, " Have you got any book about 
money ?" He had been elected to Congress only 
the day before, and he was going to read up I 
Here was a specimen of the men who do our 
financial legislation. And yet we speak of profes- 
sional politicians with a sneer. Why, the desider- 
atum of the time is a class of professional politi- 
cians, men with political ambition, but not less with 
political culture and political enthusiasm, and stern 
resolve that the political administration of Amer- 
ica shall not always be the sweetest consolation 
of monarchs and aristocrats across the sea ; nay, 
but a herald of their doom. 

We want here in America not only a class of 
professional politicians, men educated to the sci- 
ence and the art of government as carefully as 
physicians are educated to the science and the art 
of medicine and lawyers to the science and the art 
of law, but also a class of educated journalists who 
shall make journalism as much a profession, and as 
honorable a one, as divinity or medicine or law. 
Journalism is to-day the one great force in our 
American life. In power and opportunity it is 
what the pulpit was one hundred years ago. The 
newspapers make and unmake the politicians. But 
they are seldom leaders of thought. They lag be- 
hind the average intelligence and moral sentiment 
of the community. They consult expediency in- 
stead of justice. They are organs of party, not 
of the spirit. They do not keep both eyes for 



230 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



truth, but always one for the subscription-list. 
They do not lead, but follow, popular sentiment. 
Let this decree that Gen. Grant or Gen. Butler 
shall be the next President, and one by one ever)- 
Republican or Democratic paper, as the case may 
be, will fall into line and discover that the candi- 
date has all the cardinal virtues ; or, under the plea 
of " principles, not men," conveniently forget a 
hundred doughty editorials of which the inspiring 
theme, and justly so, was, " Men are incarnate 
principles. ' ' To say a thing in such a way that just 
the opposite thing can be said three months hence 
without apparent contradiction is journalism con- 
sidered as a fine art. The press is nothing if it is 
not oracular. Men quote to me as if they were 
infallible the judgments of the press on this book 
or that picture, when the chances are the criticism 
is written by a callow youth who confounds Ed- 
mund with Herbert Spencer, and but for the 
name in the corner could not distinguish between 
a painting by Alma Tadema and one by Gustave 
Dore. No matter how little the journalist knows 
about anything ; if he can talk about it as if he 
knew everything, he is all right. The newsboy 
becomes a reporter and the reporter an editor, his 
grammar and his rhetoric debauched by having 
read newspapers and nothing else. And so it hap- 
pens that although the press is a great power, it is 
a power for evil quite as often as for good. What we 
need is a profession of journalism, the training for 
which shall combine all the details of printing and 
of office-work together with many years of special 
stud}- upon history and social science. I know of 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



2^1 



one young man who is training himself for jour- 
nalism in this way. First a practical printer, he 
next acquired a first-rate college education, and 
now he is studying hard, especially in American 
history, drenching himself with its facts and its 
philosophy, and fitting himself thus to be a real 
teacher of his fellow-citizens. There must be 
many others, of whom I do not know, but there 
ousfht to be hundreds of young men in America 
to-day at work in this direction, and sooner or later 
there must be if American journalism is going to 
be a savor unto life and not unto death. What I 
have now said is broadly true, but of course there 
are particular exceptions. There are journals 
which are representative of both culture and con- 
science, and this because men of culture and con- 
science sit in their editorial chairs. 

The decay of patriotism in America is a notable 
sign of the times. But though Dr. Johnson said, 
" Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," 
the saying is not any truer than a hundred other of 
his sayings — the offspring of ill-temper and defec- 
tive culture and a narrow mind — if it was intend- 
ed to impeach the value of patriotism and not 
merely the value of the scoundrel. " O Liberty," 
said Madame Roland, " how many crimes have 
been committed in th}- name!" and yet she did 
not doubt the good of liberty. Rehgion has from 
first to last been the cloak of innumerable hypoc- 
risies, and yet religion is no worse on this ac- 
count. We need an avatar of patriotism, a new 
birth of it, here in America. It need not be nar- 
row and provincial. It need not be conceited. 



2^2 



THE STATE OF THE NATIOJ^. 



It need not blind us to our faults ; nay, rather 
it may make us lynx-eyed to search them out. 
Mr. Emerson has \yritten recently, " Let the pas- 
sion for America cast out the passion for Eu- 
rope." But there are some thino^s in Europe \xe 
(jught to haye a passion for. T cannot sympa- 
thize with Emerson's desire that ^ve should haye 
a distinctiye American dress and architecture and 
literature, and so on. Let us seek the best every- 
where. At the same time I do detest the syco- 
phantic wa}' in which we wait f(jr foreign yer- 
dicts on our American products. English en- 
thusiasm did not prove Joaquin Miller a true 
poet, and English depreciation cannot prove our 
noble Whittier anything but one. And / \yould 
have a ' ' passion for America, ' ' and not only a pas- 
sion for her honor and her righteousness, but also 
a passion for her beauty and prosperity, and for her 
history, and for her literature, and for her henjes 
and statesmen. We can afford to laugh at the 
suggestion that the Yosemite was })urchased for 
a national park " in (jrder to show what sort of 
natural scenery can be produced under a republi- 
can form of gON'ernment," and still be very proud 
of the Yosemite and the White Mountains and 
the Adirondacks and Niagara. vSpread-eagleism 
has had its day, but I should like to have a lit- 
tle more of that good, health}- sense of national 
glory and achievement of which the most culti- 
vated English writers do not seem to be ashamed. 
We have become much too shamefaced and apolo- 
ofetic. Let us acknowleds^e every fault and fail- 
ure and still, upon the whole, dare to confront the 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



-OJ 



civilization of the world with an iinbhishing front. 
The worst of our mistakes and crimes can easily be 
|)arallcled, if not surpassed, by contemporary mis- 
takes and crimes of England and the Continent. 
The wonder is we are no worse, so many of their 
exasperated citizens have taken refuge on our 
shore. Yes, let us have a passion for America ; 
and to this end let us begin to impress upon our 
children's minds in earliest youth the history of (jur 
national career, teaching full soon their lips to lov- 
ingly recite the ballads of our homespun heroism 
and heroic men. It is the disgrace of our higher 
education, for the most part, that it gives ten times 
as much attention to foreign and ancient as to 
American historv, when it ought to give ten times 
as much to American as to foreign and ancient. 
Surely never was history more full of romance or 
adventure, noble excitement, generous inspira- 
tion. It onlv waits the genius of a Green or a 
Macaulay to make such a tale of it as shall keep 
" children from their play and old men from the 
chimney-corner. 

The distrust and fear which have of late suc- 
ceeded to our former confidence have fastened 
with special violence upon universal suffrage as 
the bane of our political life, the promise of our 
irretrievable dismav. But wherever this is al- 
ready established it is safe to say that it will not 
be disestablished. With popular sentiment more 
rampant than it has ever been, no franchise that 
has been already given to the people is going to 
be withdrawn. Try it, and see what thunder 3T)u 
will have about your ears. And however ill- 



234 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



qualified thousands of voters may be, especially 
in our great cities, nothing- is surer than that they 
are far less dangerous where they are than they 
would be on the outside of the body politic. The 
ballot is a convenient crater for volcanic passions 
that would else set the whole social continent to 
rumbling, undulating, and disgorging under our 
feet. But the inevitable corollary of universal 
suffrage is universal education. First, last, and 
always this must be insisted on. And the univer- 
sal education must include some elementar}- in- 
struction in the principles of the American Gov- 
ernment and the facts of its development. And 
lest the schools, especially the sectarian schools, 
should fail to do their duty, the state or national 
government ought to be so far paternal in its 
office as to see that every home is w^ell provided 
with some simple instrument for such elementary 
instruction." These faihng of their duty, it re- 
mains for individual effort to direct itself to such 
an end. Would that to this some elementary in- 
struction might be added in the principles of po- 
litical economy ! If this had always been a part 
of our common-school education, 1 think we should 
not now have hundreds of thousands of people 
imagining that the government can create labor 
or manufacture wealth, any more than we should 
have a tariff which fattens eight millions of people 
upon the flesh and blood of thirty-four millions, 
and defies the principles which have been estab- 
lished science in the region of political economy 
for a whole century. 

Another count in the indictment of the social 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



235 



pessimist is that the average morality of America 
has for some years past been deteriorating very 
rapidly. This count must be allowed, and the 
worst thing about it is that the deterioration is of 
that virtue which is the binding cement of all 
true society, — the virtue of integrity. It is 
not contended that the vices of intemperance 
and licentiousness have grown upon us. The 
facts, if we could get at them all, would prob- 
ably show that in these respects we have been 
getting on. But whereas crimes of sensuality 
and intemperance were venial at the begin- 
ning of the century, now crimes of dishon- 
esty are so. The abuse of public and of private 
trusts has been a startling feature of our recent 
social and political life. And what has been done 
on a large scale bv national and state and coun- 
ty financiers, and by bank presidents and insur- 
ance managers, has been done on a small scale by 
people everywhere. In the hard times of 1857 
people who could not earn but 50 cents a day 
lived upon 50 cents a day and gave up all their 
little luxuries ; ate bread without butter, and 
drank coffee without milk. Now the same class 
of people earning $1 a day live at the rate of $2 a 
day, and let the grocer and the butcher pay the 
balance. Now they must have the best of every- 
thing, money or no money. This is the rule, 
but here again, of course, there are exceptions : 
men and women starving everywhere rather than 
eat the bread of charity or that for which they 
cannot pay. 

It is eas}- enough to account in some degree 



236 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



for these diseased and moribund conditions of our 
social life. They are to some extent, to a consid- 
erable extent, the offspring of those " good times" 
of the war when, with a currency monstrously 
inflated, wages were high, money was plenty, and 
extravagant expenditure was the order of the 
day. Those were the times when bounty-money, 
which should have been as sacred as the lives it 
symbolized, vanished " like the dew of heaven on 
the cliffs of Foulah." Women who had never 
had a ten-dollar-bill of their own in all their lives 
before spent hundreds in a few days of glori- 
ous shopping. Contractors for the government 
earned thousands and millions of dollars in a few 
months or years. And then came the reaction. 
The bounty-money had been spent. The real 
estate shrank to a fraction of its original nominal 
value. The need of plain living became every 
day more evident. But the habits of extrava- 
gance engendered bv the abominable " good 
times" were not easilv altered. The luxuries 
and dainties must be had, paid for or not paid tor. 
Hence defalcations on the right hand and the 
left ; hence general defect of honesty, and with 
this the loss of self-respect and ever deeper shame. 
Alas ! the blood of our voung heroes was not the 
dearest price we paid for national union and eman- 
cipation I 

If we had had here in America a type ol re- 
ligion pre-eminently moral, insisting above all 
things upon righteousness, it is quite possible that 
the destructive energy of an inflated currency 
might have been counteracted. But in fact the 
prevailing tvpe of our religion has been and is 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



237 



pre-eminently unmoral ; it insists upon righteous- 
ness not first of all, but last of all. Salvation is 
the principal thing, and righteousness has noth- 
incr whatever to do with the matter of salvation. 
This depends not upon character, but upon faith 
in the atoning merits of the blood of Jesus. If 
this religion had been a development of recent 
times, it would have had but little influence in the 
working out of our social p]-oblem. But it was 
on the ground when the demoralizing influences 
of the war, or rather of its attendant circum- 
stances, first made themselves felt. It was in the 
grain of the community, dif in by centuries of 
preaching and teaching and ecclesiastical routine. 
And being what it was, it was a religion which, 
instead of counteracting the evil influences of the 
abominable " goods times," conspired with these 
for the destruction of our moral life. The natural 
corollary of not paying one's own moral debts 
w^as not paying one's own business debts. If 
mercantile morality had nothing to do with sal- 
v^ation, why be so ver}^ anxious about mercantile 
morality ? No wonder then that, almost without 
exception, the abuse of sacred trusts, the squan- 
dering of other people's money, has been the fault 
of men of highest evangelical repute, of marked 
religiosity, active beyond all others in their re- 
spective churches, " shining like stars in the firma- 
ment." No wonder that when the demoralization 
of the abominable "good times" was joined in 
marriage with the doctrine of salvation zi'it/ioiit 
character, the children born of such a marriage 
have been Dishonesty and Faithlessness. 

There is another sign of the religious aspect 



238 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



of the times which demands some brief consider- 
ation. The old theology has lost its hold upon 
the more intelligent and cultivated people in 
America. But in the majority of cases, instead of 
boldly declaring their convictions, these keep up 
a show of orthodox belief and worship. If now 
and then they have a twinge of conscience and 
consult the rector or the minister, he confesses 
privately that he is very much of their opinion. 
Asked to read a certain service in a certain 
church, I declined. " Wh}'," said the gentle- 
manly warden, " two thirds of the congregation 
put their own construction on these words. Why 
can't you do the same ?" And so we go. The 
ignorance of the community is still implicit!}' de- 
voted to the popular theology. The intelligence 
of the community keeps up an appearance which 
has no basis of reality. It is this state of things 
which might well make Ezra Stiles exclaim, if he 
were living now, " It is the darkest day that ever 
America saw." 

To these phenomena of mercantile dishonesty 
and unspiritual religion add the phenomena of 
wide-spread discontent prevailing in the indus- 
trial classes, the communistic schemes that form 
the staple of a world of senseless talk and lawless 
aspiration, which would make the general gov- 
ernment a gigantic soup-house and compel its 
legislation to reflect the shifty sentiments of the 
untutored population, together with the spectacle 
of ignorant or malicious demagogues appealing 
to all that is most selfish, mean, and sordid in the 
human heart — and you have a horoscope which is 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



239 



not SO cheerful as might be ; which is indeed, and 
to no small degree, discouraging and ominous of 
ill. To cry peace, peace, when there is no peace 
is not the part of wisdom certainly. But no more 
is it the part of wisdom to exaggerate the popular 
discontent. The greater part of it is superficial, 
caused by the stress of present suffering and the 
enforced economies of our return to honest ways 
from our excursions into the illimitable void. Let 
there be honesty and frugality, with the read- 
justment of labor so that the overstocked depart- 
ments of trade and manufacture shall make over 
their surplus to the short-handed agriculturists, 
and, with the return of general activity, even with- 
out the false and lying appearance of prosperity 
which we have left behind us, Kearney and his 
fellow-demagogues would, if I am not mistaken, 
find their occupation gone. For the rest, our 
hope of rescue from the vague unrest or practical 
result of communistic speculations lies in the edu- 
cation of the whole community, not merely of the 
poor and uneducated, but of the rich who have 
the form without the substance of enlightenment. 
When men of much apparent culture and intelli- 
gence advocate the conversion of our city govern- 
ment into a great labor bureau, as if the city had 
a private mine and mint at its disposal, or as if the 
burden of taxation were not already greater than 
the majority can bear, it is a sign that ignorance 
of the first principles of political economy is not 
confined to manual laborers, but is an omnipres- 
ent evil. But there is intelligence in the com- 
munity which only needs a challenge sharp 



240 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



enough to prove with overwhehning force that 
this great reformatory idea of a paternal bureau- 
cratic government is one which we have been 
painfully disengaging ourselves from for hundreds 
of years ; one which has always been the step- 
ping-stone of tyrants to their thrones ; and one 
which has ever been " the first and therefore the 
falsest that meets the mind when it begins to 
reflect on the reform of human society." If, with 
all the hoarded learning it has got from cen- 
turies of experience, the aggregate intelligence of 
modern society is not able to meet the great re- 
formatory idea of a paternal, bureaucratic, com- 
munistic government in a fair field and " give it 
all it wants," then it deserves to be humiliated to 
the last degree. Well said John Milton, " Let 
Truth and Falsehood grapple ; who ever knew 
Truth to be put to the worse in a free and open 
encounter?" 

But the quarter from which I expect the great- 
est help in the solution of this labor problem, as 
we call it, is practical, not intellectual or argu- 
mentative. For it is from the justice and the 
faithfulness of individual men who in their various 
positions of responsibility shall carry themselves 
so wisely, so forbearingly, so tenderly, that they 
shall not onl}- convince those in employment 
under them that the interests of capital and labor 
are identical, but shall make them each and all 
apostles of this doctrine up and down the land. 

And yet it well may be that in all these form- 
less discontents and foolish aspirations there is the 
promise and the potency of some more equitable 



A aUI Ann BB AC* 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



241 



distribution of that wealth, which is the joint 
product of capital and labor, than we have yet 
attained unto. T am by no means sure that the 
exact relative value of the brains and hands con- 
cerned in all manufacturing is fairly expressed 
by the relative profits of the employer and em- 
ployed. The world is still young, and it would 
be ver}^ strange if we had got already to the 
highest point attainable in these concerns and 
need not keep our minds open and receptive to 
some further revelation. 

Moreover, in these discontents and aspirations 
may there not be a hint that our political economy, 
though excellent in its own sphere, does not ex- 
haust the social problem in its entirety ? Within 
the sphere of political econom}' it is a lawful say- 
ing, " He that \vill not work shall not eat." But 
there are those who cannot work, and, even of 
those who 7^-/// not, the unwilling will is sometimes 
a disease as positive as cholera or typhus. These 
are phenomena of which our political economy 
takes no account. So then our social science, 
inspired by our Christianity or such other religion 
as we have, must take account of them. Here is 
the sphere for our paternal government. It is not 
for men and women " full-summed in all their 
powei-s," but for the weakhngs and the drones ; 
those to be cared for with a divine compassion, 
these to be dealt with firmly and compelled to 
earn their right to live. 

It is not, then, to be denied that in the state of 
the nation, considered not merely as a working 
government but also as a society of upwards of 



242 



THE STATE OF THE NATION. 



forty millions of men, women, and children, there 
is much that is not as those who love America 
would have it, much that is ill and portentous of 
yet greater ill to come. And in all the horoscope 
the most baleful star is that which ought to shine 
with the most cheerful light, the pole-star of re- 
ligion. And yet I cannot doubt that out of all 
these sorrows and distresses the Spirit Avill yet 
lead us up and on. " He will bring upon us fear 
and dread and trial. He will torture us with the 
tribulation of his discipline, till he try us by his 
laws and test our soul. Then he will strengthen 
us and make our way straight for us and give us 

joy-" 

But one word more and I will end your weari- 
ness. It may be that you are asking. If these 
things are so, what ought a man to do who would 
acquit himself right manfull)^ ? Some hints I trust 
I have given on the way, but the one thing that 
he should do, and can, is to see to it that one single 
individual, namely himself, in the midst of what- 
ever falsehood is true, in the midst of whatever 
dishonesty is honest, in the midst of whatever in- 
sincerity is sincere, and that, in the midst of what- 
ever religion of glorified irresponsibleness, his re- 
ligion is to him first and foremost a principle and 
law of righteousness. So doing, haply it shall 
be made plain to him how he can help in other 
ways to make America a righteous nation whose 
God is the Eternal. 



GAYLORD IROS. 

MAKERS 

SYRACUSE, - H.Y. 

PAT. JAN. 21, laOB 





^^^^ggg^^^l^gglggjg^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 789 610 2 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 789 610 2 



